An Account of the Late Intended Insurrection among a Portion of the Blacks of…

This is a rare and chilling primary source: the official 1822 account published byCharleston's city authorities documenting a planned slave insurrection that terrified the city. What emerged was not an uprising but a crackdown, as investigations, trials, and executions followed the discovery of the plot. The document reveals how white officials understood, feared, and responded to Black resistance, while inadvertently preserving details about the motivations, organization, and aspirations of the enslaved people who dared to imagine freedom. Reading it feels like holding a piece ofhistory in motion: the authorities' own record of the moment when the ground beneathCharleston's slave system seemed to shake. This is essential reading for anyone interested in American slavery, resistance, and the fraught work of reconstructing the past from the documents left by those in power.